Hi
Am i right in thinking that it's not possible to rsync my OpenBSD 4.8 to a drive formatted for ext3?
So for backing up and restoring Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD to an external USB drive, i'd have to use fdisk to make a slice for Linux/FreeBSD and format it accordingly, then make a slice for OpenBSD etc?
Or being as though i might be writing/reading from a large file(which is on an ext3 filesystem) might OpenBSD not care, due to it being a file, that this large file is on an ext3 filesystem?. Thus could i get away with just formatting the external USB drive for ext3?
I'm not joking i really am that much of a OpenBSD n00b, from a debian/CentOS background. I just want to know about the easiest way to back up and restore all my *nixes onto my 1TB drive using rsync and was wondering which way round to do it?
cheers for any advice

Am i right in thinking that it's not possible to rsync my OpenBSD 4.8 to a drive formatted for ext3?

Correct. Compare the output of the following two commands:

$man -k ext2

$man -k ext3

Quote:

So for backing up and restoring Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD to an external USB drive, i'd have to use fdisk to make a slice for Linux/FreeBSD and format it accordingly, then make a slice for OpenBSD etc?

As a practical solution, yes. Partitions will need to created which can be identified by each operating system.

If you really wanted to pursue a universal solution which would handle all operating systems, you could explore use of dd(1), but this is slow...

Quote:

Or being as though i might be writing/reading from a large file(which is on an ext3 filesystem) might OpenBSD not care, due to it being a file, that this large file is on an ext3 filesystem?.

Again, if you issued the earlier command:

$man -k ext3

...you will have found that ext3 is not supported by OpenBSD. Period.

Quote:

I'm not joking i really am that much of a OpenBSD n00b, from a debian/CentOS background...

We all are/were newbies at some point. You don't need to endlessly repeat this fact.

Quote:

I just want to know about the easiest way to back up and restore all my *nixes onto my 1TB drive using rsync and was wondering which way round to do it?

Again, create partitions recognized by each operating system & back up as recommended by each operating system culture.

In this thread it says i can back up a FreeBSD system by sending the back up through the network, to a Linux system that has an ext3 formatted drive attached to it. Yet the output of:

Code:

#man -k ext3

On FreeBSD says that ext3 is unsupported.
and in this thread it says that OpenBSD can't be backed up to a Linux box over the network, to a Linux box with an ext3 formatted external drive attached to it, using rsync. So why can FreeBSD be backed up, over the network, using rsync and OpenBSD can't when both FreeBSD and OpenBSD don't support ext3??
Thank you very much for getting me one step closer to backing up all my *nixes
regards

@unixjingleman: It would seem that you have a vague understanding of what a "filesystem" actually is, only the kernel needs to be aware the low-level implementation details. User-land programs need only deal with files and directories that are mapped into a virtual filesystem hierarchy.

OpenBSD/FreeBSD support both ext2 and arguably ext3, but only the former is safe to write to.. ext3 is ext2 with journaling (..a low level capability that "logs" changes to files), this functionality is not supported and mounting a ext3 filesystem rw will probably corrupt critical filesystem metadata (..on-disk structures interpreted by the kernel).

For example, a Windows system connecting to a BSD system over FTP would obviously not need to support FFS.. instead both systems share the concept of "files" and "directories" and communicate using an established protocol.

Thanks BSDfan666. You've pointed out something that my thought processes omitted for some reason. I've know about most of the common protocols and about networks for years yet failed to understand file systems properly and didn't deduce, from my knowledge, the obvious nature of file transfer protocols/programs.
cheers